Dean Explains Why Law School Is The Biggest Catch-22 Of Them All

Law students are being set up to fail under the current system, a University of California law dean told the American Bar Association.Contrary to popular belief, there is actually a “tremendous quantity of legal work that is not being done,” Frank Wu, dean at University of California Hastings College of the Law, told the ABA in a letter.

Yet somehow there are “too many law students training for a J.D. in a market that is already saturated,” he said.

Basically, as Wu explains, we have too many students going to law schools that don’t emphasise practical legal skills. Meanwhile, legal work in nonprofits or rural areas suffers.

“The pipeline has not been built in the right manner to bring new graduates to their potential clients,” Wu says in his letter. “Aside from issues of student debt, the training our students receive—despite profound changes unnoticed by critics—still does not emphasise skills enough.”

Wu goes on to highlight a lot of other problems he sees in our legal education system.

However, he doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions, other than suggesting law schools need to change the way they’re educating students.